The Missing Piece of the Attribution Puzzle

Oren KanielFeb 19, 2019

2011 – The Dawn of Attribution

It all started back in 2011, when two high-school friends set out to do the impossible: give app developers visibility into their own marketing activities. We were told we wouldn’t be able to measure apps in the closed world of the newly born app stores, but in reality, it was inevitable – and we were subsequently building something in a category that just didn’t exist yet.

It was difficult to get investors to see the full picture; they asked us if there’s a parallel solution for the web. The market wasn’t yet fully aware of the need for attribution, let alone the significance of unbiased and independent attribution. To us, however, the need was obvious. We asked ourselves, are we missing something? How can we be the first ones doing this?

Slide from AppsFlyer’s original pitch deck, 2011

In retrospect, the introduction of mobile apps and app stores had created a huge challenge for marketers: the web-based solutions they had grown to rely on – cookies and pixels – couldn’t work for mobile. This challenge was the driving force behind our venture. In 2011, we thought we were ‘just’ building attribution technology, but what we actually built was a game-changer that shifted the entire industry to be more transparent, measurable, trustworthy, free of fraud and conflicts of interests.

Attribution as a Core

Attribution is the most mission-critical tool in the marketing stack, and for us – attribution has, and always will be at the core of our mission.

As I recently wrote, companies select AppsFlyer based on these 5 key pillars :

The Critical Elements: Security, Privacy, and Stability

Data Accuracy: Over-Attribution and Fraud Prevention

Innovation, First-to-Market and Key Features

The AppsFlyer Experience – Being Customer Obsessed

The Product Roadmap and Vision

While all pillars are critical to our success, serving our customers is front and center. We have spent the past eight years developing and perfecting the ultimate mobile attribution solution, serving many of the world’s savviest marketers. It is thanks to our customers that AppsFlyer has become The Attribution Authority. AppsFlyer’s products and features have evolved alongside our customers’ needs and requests, to provide the most comprehensive attribution-first solution out there. No other company has been tackling attribution for as long or as extensively as AppsFlyer has.

“AppsFlyer is our source of truth when it comes to attribution. We have gained full 360-degree insight to our user acquisition activity, while lowering our costs. No marketing tech stack is complete without AppsFlyer.“Sadie Daryan, Global Head of Display & App Marketing, eBay

We have evolved our product to meet the attribution needs of an increasingly connected world. With the largest product development and solutions team in the industry, innovation is at the forefront of our continuously-growing offering. In recent years, we have added various measurement capabilities such as TV attribution, offline measurement, Kindle, PC, IOT, OTT devices and game consoles. Though we’ve expanded the attribution vision, this picture was not complete; the one thing missing in this vision of holistic attribution was the addition of web attribution to tie everything together.

The Missing Piece

Fast forward to 2019, where technology has continued to evolve and data does for marketers today what they could only have dreamed of a decade ago. However, all these advancements have left gaping holes in their midst; companies are still struggling with understanding the full picture of their customer journey.

While mobile attribution has been critical to marketing success, it can’t deliver the whole picture; it’s a crucial piece of a bigger puzzle.

The future of attribution: a holistic view

“Advancing people-based attribution is a natural next step for AppsFlyer,” says Simon Lejeune, Head of User Acquisition at Hopper. “Their mastery in mobile attribution has been a major key to the success of our mobile campaigns and is an essential component of our marketing tech stack. While the true potential of holistic, people-based attribution has yet to be fully realized, we look forward to AppsFlyer expanding its expertise in mobile to the digital world and beyond, bringing about a new world of possibilities for marketers to have better, more meaningful interactions with consumers.”

Marketers need a platform that connects all of their marketing efforts, across devices, platforms and channels to provide a holistic system of record of customer data, customer journey and accurate ROI. Marketers worldwide have fallen in love with the AppsFlyer Experience for mobile attribution, and want to extend it to the rest of their marketing efforts.

We’ve spent the past two years architecting our platform to accommodate the ultimate cross-platform, cross-device, cross-channel attribution. Specifically, over the past year, we’ve worked closely with several design partners to realize this larger vision. With 72% market share and visibility into 98% of the world’s devices, we are perfectly positioned to build the holistic people-based attribution the entire market has been waiting for, and this is what we have done.

Today, I am extremely excited to announce the first step in our grand vision of AppsFlyer’s holistic attribution to include People-Based Attribution and Smart Banners. With this step, we continue to drive our attribution-first legacy, the same one we began building some eight years ago.

“Being able to connect the dots between web and mobile is essential for our business. In today’s multi-channel and multi-device world, identifying precisely how customers are interacting with our brand has been a huge pain point for us. AppsFlyer’s people-based attribution is going to change the way we do marketing, giving us insights we’ve never had access to before.“Denitsa Georgieva, Head of Acquisition Marketing, Virtuo

Eight years ago, our investors asked us what AppsFlyer’s parallel solution is for the web. It turns out, they were asking the wrong question. They should have asked us, “what’s the solution for tying together the user journey, across devices, platforms and channels?” Today, we finally have the answer: we are the solution.

About Oren Kaniel

Oren Kaniel is co-founder and CEO of AppsFlyer. He loves everything mobile and is a creative thinker, listener, talker, and is trying to be a blogger. Oren holds a BA in Computer Science, Cum Laude, from the Technion, and an MBA from IDC, as part of an exchange with the Wharton Business School.